Producing “Bollywood”: The Social & Institutional Transformations of the Hindi Film Industry
This talk provides a preview of the main themes of Tejaswini Ganti’s recent book, Producing Bollywood, which examines the transformations of the Hindi film industry starting in the mid-1990s that have enabled it to become “Bollywood.” These transformations have been enabled by the neoliberal restructuring of the Indian state and economy, which resulted in a dramatically altered media landscape marked first by the entry of satellite television and then by the emergence of the multiplex theater. The talk focuses on the changing status of the “universal hit” within the Hindi film industry, locating it within the changing structures of production, distribution, and exhibition characterizing Hindi film-making since 2000.
Tejaswini Ganti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and its Pro-gram in Culture & Media at New York University. A visual anthropologist specializing in South Asia, her research interests include Indian cinema, visual culture, ethnography of media, cultural policy, nationalism, neoliberalism, ideologies of development and theories of globalization. She is the author of Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge 2004; 2nd edition 2013) and Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Duke 2012).
This Lecture is sponsored by Global Studies and is part of the Mellon Foundation New Inter-national Studies Lecture Series.